Read on Twitter
This is utterly fascinating. Why did the UK react so slowly, in spite of seeing the pandemic unfold in other countries?
"British scientists assumed that such drastic actions would never be acceptable in a democracy like the UK." 1/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-path-speci/special-report-johnson-listened-to-his-scientists-about-coronavirus-but-they-were-slow-to-sound-the-alarm-idUSKBN21P1VF
"British scientists assumed that such drastic actions would never be acceptable in a democracy like the UK." 1/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-path-speci/special-report-johnson-listened-to-his-scientists-about-coronavirus-but-they-were-slow-to-sound-the-alarm-idUSKBN21P1VF
Yet here we are now. It's April, and democracies like the UK and US which highly prize individual freedom are in stringent lockdown. The presumption that somehow effective but stringent actions from SE Asia would not work there bc of cultural differences is dangerous. 2/
So take for instance S Korea (a democracy, btw), which used extensive data mining to, for the moment successfully it seems, track spreaders and test extensively. We should be indeed wary of use of data in this way, but... 3/ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00740-y
But I find it a bit strange, if that's the word, that people were saying S Korea measures would never fly in a western democracy which prizes individual privacy, given the UK's passing of the snooper charter https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/lbill/2016-2017/0066/17066.pdf 4/
This was passed as law in UK in 2016 "The new surveillance law requires web and phone companies to store everyone’s web browsing histories for 12 months and give the police, security services and official agencies unprecedented access to the data." 5/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/29/snoopers-charter-bill-becomes-law-extending-uk-state-surveillance
More info on the S Korean strategy here (a nice, nuanced take I think) : https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-south-koreas-success-in-controlling-disease-is-due-to-its-acceptance-of-surveillance-134068
I am not denying that all of this raises significant concerns about privacy, and one should remain vigilant about the use of data by governments. 6/
I am not denying that all of this raises significant concerns about privacy, and one should remain vigilant about the use of data by governments. 6/
But... I also think people in Western democracies have no idea how much snooping power they have already ceded to their governments! "Following the Sept 11th attacks of 2001, domestic and international mass surveillance capabilities grew immensely" 7/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_United_States
And I'm not even saying anything here of the uncontrolled mass surveillance powers of private tech giants (e.g., Zuckerberg, Facebook) which are uncontrolled, it seems. So in light of all this the western concern for S Korea's strategies to contain the virus are hypocritical 8/
